Carlos Tevez's spell as the world's highest-paid footballer was wild

For a short time, Carlos Tevez was the highest-paid footballer in the world.

In December 2016, the former Manchester United and Manchester City striker left boyhood club Boca Juniors to join Chinese Super League outfit, Shanghai Shenhua.

At that time, the big names who moved to the Far East pocketed serious sums of money and Tevez earned an extraordinary £615,000-a-week.

That’s obscene money and Shanghai Shenhua’s reward for putting millions in the Argentine’s bank account was a measly four goals in just 20 appearances.

The numbers only tell half the story, though.

That’s because Tevez’s spell as the world’s highest-paid footballer was absolutely wild, as the Daily Mail reported when Gareth Bale was being linked with a mega-money to China of his own in the summer of 2019.

So, to start things off, Tevez was homesick from the moment he touched down in the Far East. He famously told reporters: “When I landed in China, I realised that I wanted to go back to Boca (Juniors). I was on vacation for seven months.”

Yeah, not the greatest of beginnings at a football club.

Despite bringing an entourage of 20 people with him to China, Tevez never came close to settling either on or off the pitch and the food available really bothered him as well.

Gus Poyet, who was his first manager in Shanghai, said: “The language is complicated – but with the food, there are people who suffer a little more and that happened to Tevez.

“At the beginning he did not eat almost anything. We had a barbecue… and we had to remove the Chinese food.”

Tevez’s dislike of Chinese cuisine meant his diet suffered and he was subsequently overweight when Poyet was replaced as manager by Wu Jingui. Needless to say, the new boss wasn’t happy.

“I will not pick him